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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Serving our Jersey suburb is a pest control company (maybe many) that will catch unwanted rodents (woodchucks, raccoons) in have-a-heart traps and allegedly transport them to public land at least ten miles away (sounds suspiciously like giving Rex to a farm family, but bear with me). Contemplating an invisible fence for a prospective new dog (alas, only blind Merlin of blessed memory could be contained by our 15-inch stone wall at the back), my sons started speculating about a have-a-heart exterminator that would catch unwanted rodents, tranquilize them and collar them.* That raised the problem of the collared pests' offspring and led us to the inevitable conclusion that responsiveness to the invisible fence would would have to be infused by genetic modification.

Ergo, the answer to this post's title is yes. And getting there (here, sort of) is the whole purpose of this post.

*We also speculated that widespread adoption would lead to pest infestation of lower-income neighborhoods abutting the served towns or neighborhoods, but that does not get us where we're going here.

About Me

I'm a media consultant with a lasting interest in how democracy works, how it malfunctions and self-corrects. My working assumption is that you can't fool all the people all the time -- at least, not in Fox News's current stage of development.
I have a Ph.D. in medieval English literature and a propensity to parse the rhetoric and logic of our political leaders as well as that of media pundits and scholars who jump into the national debate. I wrote a dissertation on the remarkably humane and subtle medieval English anchorite Julian of Norwich, a mystic nun whose knack of squaring circles and framing paradoxes reminds me a little of our current president. A sampling of that work (mind the google gaps) is here: http://bit.ly/OzwsrR